


In Search of Lost Time

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canada, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Drug Abuse, Getting Back Together, M/M, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 18:42:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10859826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: North-West Territories, 1877. Before the gold rush, act two of the grand and horrible coincidence.





	In Search of Lost Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FinalSoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FinalSoul/gifts).



> this is a sequel to [desperado](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4144170). it can be read by itself, but some things might make more sense if you read that one first.

_North-West Territories, Canada  
_ _1877_

\--

To calculate sixteen years in what had been lost: his mind, first. His taste for whiskey. A compendium of memory staticked out. His best friend, his lover, his godson, his respect for his hero or any other lawmen, his fortune, his family homestead, probably his brother, a smaller secret war within the larger, the maps and the roads inside his head to places in the high woods and the mountains and the desert, hope, trust, certainty, love, finally the last of it, seized surgically with pincers. He wondered if he could ride a horse or shoot a gun still if he tried. He lay in the moving shaft of light. He wondered if he could swim. 

He could, could, and could, it turned out, in the end. He walked out of the water feeling just born. Then he kept walking. 

\--

Remus, he learned, in a few months, had lost an arm, and his sobriety off and on and off and now on again, and any kind of forthcomingness he had ever had, not that he had ever had much. There was less of him even than there had been in 1861 but in some non-visible way Sirius couldn’t put his finger on. Remus said he had seen Peter around town and had put two and two together. They went upstairs into the little room where Remus lived and had tea. Remus asked the sorts of questions you might ask someone you had been sleeping with for six months sixteen years ago before every bad thing imaginable had happened. He looked in Sirius’s eyes with such a blunt and bright intensity Sirius could tell he was sober and hating it. Sirius asked him the same kinds of questions and he said not much. He had laid telegraph line through British Columbia for a while which was where he had learned to read and write. But the project was abandoned so he had done whatever for a while, mostly ciphering for lumber companies he said, which was almost insane to Sirius, and so absurd he wondered if perhaps the whole endeavor was a dream. But then he had come up to Dawson and he had come into ownership of the mercantile. And here he was. The days were long and dark. Remus said everybody in town knew there was gold on the river but nobody was of a mind to do anything about it yet. Then they didn’t speak at all. Remus rested his temple in his palm and Sirius looked with a vital and unabashed kind of thrill at the place where his arm had been. He had folded up neatly the sleeve of his flannel shirt and fixed it there with some kind of Union Army pin whose significance Sirius couldn’t decipher. The whole sleeve had slipped down his wrist a little showing the old familiar scar beneath the soft monadnock of bone. In an almost shocking way Sirius remembered making love with him in the desert. Everything was different now. The air was humid-cold and smelled like rain even inside. 

“Can I stay here for a while,” he said. 

Remus looked up at him across the table and he settled back in the chair folding his arm across his chest. “Yeah,” he said after a long moment. 

“You sure?” 

“Course I ain’t fuckin sure.” 

That made him laugh which made Remus smile just enough to turn away toward the darkness in the window. You break my heart, Sirius thought, wanted to say, just being, every fucking inch of you, it breaks my heart… 

“I know it ain’t coincidence,” Remus said. “Christ. We didn’t finish it then so we have to finish it now.” 

“Finish what?” 

“Vengeance. I don’t know.” 

\--

He had seen Remus for the first time in sixteen years out by the riverbank below the mercantile fishing whilst smoking a cigarette. At first Sirius hadn’t even been able to tell his arm was gone. He’d had on his big duck coat and a fisherman’s sweater and boots. And it was raining and the rain made a soft sound on the water and the fish were jumping and Remus looked around at the mountains and the fog with a kind of vague rapture. 

Sirius had come up because there had been an article in one of the San Francisco papers Dumbledore sometimes left with him in prison about land buys in the Yukon and the purchase of several such tracts of land in the vicinity of Dawson by one VDM Corporation, who had been represented in purchases elsewhere in the North-West Territories by a broker referred to only as Dolohov. He hadn’t known anything about Remus until he had come out of the woods for water and seen him on the far shore. And he didn’t know anything about the kids until another week later. 

He had hated Remus at first, he thought he remembered, because it was Remus’s fault that his leg was broken so badly and it was Remus’s fault, because Remus had killed his horse, that he’d had to walk on it for two days before the Texas Rangers had caught up with him. It was indisputable, he thought, sitting in the cell, listening to the fog and the screaming, that Remus’s behavior had been more suspicious than his own and yet Remus hadn’t believed it was possible for him to be innocent. But all this was possibly because Remus’s head was so addled; even if he wasn’t high all the time anymore ten years taking drugs every day had to have permanent effects. Remus didn’t really believe it was possible to be loved, Sirius reasoned eventually. In the window the fog moved against the bay. Sometimes from the other cells below he heard murders or beatings and he pressed his head against the stone and listened to the sea. The old man came by with newspapers. Eventually all the resentment and the subsequent guilt had gone and left behind itself a kind of still and glassy certainty which was that love conquered most but vengeance conquered all, or some similar mantra. 

So out of the woods across the river he was thinking with a slow evolving shock, that’s my person. Maybe he had thought Remus was dead. Certainly that had been what seemed most probable. He wasn't dead. He was holding the fishing pole between his hip and forearm so he could smoke. He was drawn and kind of un-there but he had always sort of been that way. Holy heavenly fuck, Sirius was thinking. This complicates literally everything. 

\--

He slept on a pile of parkas and blankets on Remus’s floor and when he woke up in the morning there was a tin cup of coffee beside him on the floor which was lukewarm. It smelt like chicory. He drank it and he looked around the room for a while but there was not much in it. There was a notebook that was full of numbers and Remus’s clothes and blankets were folded neatly in a trunk. Also in the trunk were two books one of which was a compendium of poetry by Walt Whitman. Sirius felt the most horrible feeling he could remember feeling in several years and put the book away and closed the trunk again as if something in it had bitten him. And then there was Remus’s bed which he could hardly look at but eventually he touched the pillow, and it was cold. 

He went downstairs into the shop and Remus who had been up since dawn made him lift some things onto high shelves while he stood behind the counter doing numbers. He had told Sirius the last shipment of goods before the winter had come about a week previous and perhaps already by now the passes were closed between their pocket of nothing and Anchorage or Whitehorse. Of course this meant they would have to be alone together all the winter and he wondered when they would fight. It was inevitable and it seemed the longer went by without it the worse it would be. 

“How in hell did you learn math,” Sirius said. 

Remus didn’t so much as look up. “Under pressure,” he replied. 

“When you worked for Western Union?” 

“Yes. Surveying.” 

“How even did you get the job if you couldn’t do math before you started?” 

“The foreman said he’d hire sight unseen anybody who’d fought with the Union Army.” 

“So what’d he do when he saw you?” 

“Ate crow I guess.” 

It was miraculous to him to even speak to another person even if that person was Remus who spoke as little as possible. Remus’s mouth moved a little like the memory made him want to laugh or something. Miraculous, Sirius was thinking, completely miraculous. 

“I needed money desperately,” Remus said; he didn’t mention why, because Sirius knew. “It was ’64. I couldn’t lose the job. I said I was a quick study… I didn’t even know if that was true.” 

“I can’t hardly believe you of all people went straight.” 

“Well there was no more being an outlaw after what happened.” 

“I suppose so.” 

“I was fucking done. You would’ve been too if you had — if you hadn’t — ” 

“Yeah,” Sirius said, though he wasn’t sure, “I suppose so.” 

They closed up the shop when Remus was done with the numbers and went down to the river again to fish. Remus had an extra fishing pole and thinking about why made Sirius’s gut twist for a minute with perhaps jealousy until Remus explained it had belonged to the old Russian who’d built the mercantile. “He got lost in a storm maybe six years ago,” Remus said. “I went looking for his body all that summer but it was a no go.” 

“Christ.” 

“People die out here,” Remus said, “but you know that.” 

“People die everywhere.” 

“Not like they die out here.” He had caught a fish and knelt to gut it deftly with the single hand. It seemed fitting punctuation. Above there were eagles circling for the guts. The pale light filtered through the clouds against the river and spangled in the shallows casting soft wavering light against Remus’s face and his duck coat. His mouth was a thin pursed-white line. The scar across the bridge of his nose was so old now Sirius almost couldn’t make it out. It was mostly a kind of manifest memory that put it there. But toward the end of their relation sixteen years previous he thought he remembered he had stopped noticing it. It was just a feature on his beloved’s face. 

They went back up to the shop after a while and hung the fish up in the shack out back to smoke them and they sat in a comfortable silence on the back steps with cigarettes and whiskey in the tin mugs watching the pale cloudy blue smoke filter up toward the soft grey sky. 

\--

Sirius in a fit of desperation had quite simply gone to the door and knocked on it. He thought maybe Remus would kill him and wasn’t sure he would mind that. The proximity was torturous and the same thing happened over and over again in all his dreams. At first he thought he would confront Remus in the forest but if he did that certainly Remus would have a gun. So perhaps he was pretty sure he didn’t want to die. He would go to the door and get on his knees and beg forgiveness and swear his fealty to Remus in whatever battles necessary. He would assert his entire innocence in the matter and swear on his own life to prove it by whatever means possible. Instead Remus embraced him. There was so little left and he smelled like the windblown rain and yet in the soft place under his ear which Sirius’s nose was pressed into there was a little of the sweet-bright smoke smell, mezcal, cigarettes with opium, old cookfires pitch-blackened in the desert noon sun, which was like a sledgehammer of nostalgia, a very old feeling, the oldest; he held Remus tighter and Remus had the back of his coat in a fist clutching. The summer night was cold. “He’ll’ve left,” Remus said when he pulled away. His eyes were red and the tired circles under were soft and pale purple as a sunset and a little damp in the gaslight. “He’ll’ve — the pass is about to close.” 

“Who do you — ”

“Peter.” 

“Jesus.” 

“We can get you a horse and maybe you can — ” 

“No,”he said, “no, no;” they went inside, he wanted to hold Remus’s face and kiss him for two hours; he remembered the last time they had seen each other Remus had been a kind of apotheosis of blood, and pain had made him crazy, and he had been holding the baby who was howling like a wounded animal, and there had been one bullet left in the chamber of his gun. He had remembered this moment over and over in prison and thought perhaps it was proof of some impossible sanctity that Remus had had every chance and perceived reason to kill him and had not. Remus had arbited Sirius’s life and his own life and whatever it was, that possessing sixth-month thing which was everything but also nothing and a sort of distraction, and probably the worst idea either of them had ever had, but also the best, and the most certain; it was unreal, that thing, it was like the desert, it was the stuff of mirage, it was like cold water, like birds. Remus had arbited it and had found the due punishment to be dogged endurance through continued suffering of the mental and physical varieties, as of course befit his entire youngish life to date and his kaleidoscopic conception of justice as something Hammurabic and primal — an eye for an eye. Death, or worse, to be meted out by the most revered and impartial entity of all which of course was the desert. 

Altogether there could have been no worse person to love and to care for with his entire being even in the worst extremity. 

\--

The kids had bought a plot Northwards up the Yukon at one of its silted bends and at first Sirius had not recognized them until he had broken into the assayer’s office of an evening and had seen the familiar name inscribed with two unfamiliar in the ownership records. _Herman X. Granger, Harry James Potter, and Ronald B. Weasley of the Hudson’s Bay Company._ Then Sirius went by the plot again and watched from the woods as a petite boy, part Indian by his look, came out to the shore, cast a line in the water, and started reading absently from a yellow book. The tall redhead joined him after a little while with something to eat and then the third who was shockingly like James but a touch paler, big unruly hair, gangly and weedy and prone to talking wildly with his hands, appeared with gold panning equipment. He heard their voices carrying across the water: 

“Watch the fuckin hook Harry,” said the petite one. He had a bit of an accent Sirius couldn’t make out. 

“You had any luck yet?” 

“None whatsoever.” 

The redhead took the pole bodily from him and started casting in an ostentatious fly-fishing style. From the bright-black water where he was panning with his jeans rolled up to his knees Harry laughed uproariously. “What the fuck are you doing,” he said. 

“This is obviously how to do it,” said the redhead. 

The petite one had sat on the bank and folded his ankles one over the other and reclined in the sun covering his face with his hat. His shoulders were jumping a little with laughter. 

“Don’t you need special flies. Isn’t that the point? The fish think it’s a little fly landing on the water.” 

“So?”

“So worms don’t land on the water with such grace,” said the petite one from under his hat. “Lupin has the real flies over at the mercantile.” 

“We owe our entire souls to him on credit at this point,” Harry reminded him. 

Sirius’s brain wasn’t working. He didn’t even know what this feeling was. He thought again of Remus holding the baby in the slot canyon toward the winding down of the worst day. He wondered if Harry knew — how much he knew. If he had known Remus all his life. Or if this was but another prismatic function of the grand and horrible coincidence. 

\--

“They started coming up here maybe four years ago,” Remus explained. “They were apprentices with the HBC. They did the run that brings all the supplies to this shop as well as the rest of em up here.” 

“What did you think when you met them?” 

“That I was hallucinating.” 

“I thought the same when I saw Harry’s name at the assayer’s office.” 

“Yes. Well, fate or whatever cruel mistress.” 

“What about the other two?” 

“Weasley has about six brothers who also work for the Company up around here. Their mom and da homestead in Montana and they had something to do with the Union Army too. Granger is Metis from East of here on the Hudson’s Bay itself. And a sharpshooter. And the only one of the three of them who can read or write.” 

Sirius didn’t know what Metis was or where the Hudson’s Bay was located. But he nodded. 

“They bought that tract at auction in June. Actually I found out they had bought it the day I found out you had escaped from prison which was the day I first saw Peter which was the last day — well. June 9, 1877.” 

“It was the last day what?” 

Remus was rolling a cigarette against his knee deftly with the single hand. He looked up for a second into the corner of the ceiling above Sirius’s head and then he looked down again. 

“That’s more than three months. If you’ve been sober, if that’s what you mean.” 

“Longest stretch since ’72,” Remus said lightly. “You want a cigarette?” 

He offered it across the table holding it pinched by its end. Like a white flag. Something about his eyes hurt terribly. 

“Congratulations,” said Sirius. 

Remus took the cigarette back and put it between his lips and lit it with a match he struck against the table. He closed one eye to keep it from the flare and his cheeks hollowed out and Sirius looked away. 

“I mean it.” 

Remus looked at the floor. Eventually he rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. 

“It’s an incredible — ”

“Fuck off. Shut up. Please.” 

No, Sirius didn’t say. “I was a complete shit about it to you before.” 

“Sirius. I don’t — ”

“Let me fucking apologize to you.” 

“ — want to hear it. You don’t need to.” 

“I’m fucking sorry,” he said. Remus cringed. “I’m so completely fucking sorry is what I’m trying to say. I thought it meant everything I know now it didn’t. And if I had trusted you we wouldn’t be here. Or we would be here maybe but we would have been — ” He stumbled, he almost said _together._ “It would have been better the whole time.” 

Remus was quiet for a minute. He looked back up into the corner of the ceiling above Sirius’s head with such intensity Sirius almost turned around to see what was up there. “You can’t know that,” he said finally. 

“I can fake it. I can wish it was true.” 

If it all had gone as it was supposed to have gone they would have ridden together into the Sierras or the Washington Territory and bought a plot with Riddle’s bounty and they would have goats and grow asparagus and tomatoes and Remus would’ve stayed quit and none of the lost would have been lost and they would spend the days in the fields and the nights in the bed under the moth-eaten wool blankets or under the stars smoking hash on the mountainside and perhaps they would have bad dreams about the old time and wake up with a shock and speak about it in the darkness and outside the sound of the cicadas… But it would only be bad dreams that would dissolve upon waking. 

“I had nothing else to think about in prison sometimes you see,” Sirius said. “So when I stopped hating you for wrecking my leg.” 

“So you have stopped.” 

“Mostly. Walking up here sometimes.” Until I saw you, he didn’t say; the flood of memory was like a rogue wave, and I felt washed to sea, crushed, drowning, I forgot everything else… 

“I thought you’d kill me for that when you came up here and I’d deserve it,” Remus said. This was his approximation of _I’m sorry_. 

“I know what you were thinking now. And you were shot and — and your hand.” 

“I can remember it so vividly. How your dead horse smelled. And how you looked. And your fucking bone sticking our your leg. It just looked like — you know like sun-bleached dead wood rotting in the desert. It felt — I regretted how badly I’d hurt you. Even when I thought it really was you.” 

“I can remember it too. Very sharp — like a photograph. I’ve never been an artist but probably I could draw it. I could draw any number of, of things we did, places we saw together. Like I said there wasn’t much else to do in prison.” 

“Do you — well.” Remus looked up into the corner of the ceiling again. It was getting dark in the room and the ember of his cigarette was very bright. “You could tell me,” he said slowly, nervous, “I guess, anything, or what it was like.” 

“Prison?” 

“Yes, prison, coming up here, any of it.” 

“Well, most days you could only see out the window the water and the very thick fog. Like, gauze-textured blackish grey fog. Like if the whole city had burned I wouldn’t’ve been able to tell it. And the guards were like an experiment in human nature at its very fuckin worst. And at least a quarter of the people in there had never hurt a fly in their lives. But I — I don’t know, I need time, time to think about what more to say. You could tell me though if you want what happened just after.” 

Remus sighed and he got up creakily and stoked the fire in the woodstove. The color of the moonlight on the floor through the rain-spattered window was quiet and cold in contrast and it threw a melancholic blue shadow against Remus’s face. Before he came back to the table he lit the gaslight a little brighter and when he sat down he started rolling another cigarette. “Do you want one,” he said. 

Sirius wondered if he would ignore the question. “Sure.” 

“Don’t get used to it. There isn’t enough tobacco for the winter.” 

“I’m used — I’m very accustomed to taking what I can get.” 

“Right. Well.” He passed the cigarette and the matches across the table to Sirius and their fingers touched a little and Remus’s hand was cold. “Tit for tat,” he said a little anxiously. 

Sirius passed him the matches back. “I know asking you to recount any of your own history is like asking you to self-eviscerate with a spoon. But yes. Tit for tat.”

Remus sighed again in a way he probably thought was unnoticeable. He lit his second cigarette and then he watched the ember in his hand against the table and the thin still smoke that rose from it. 

“I found this doctor in El Paso to take — ” He made a cutting gesture against his empty shoulder. “He gave me drops — I mean he had to. It was — I can’t even tell you what it felt like now. Everything about it. I hardly could feel even that my arm was gone. It was, this is so pathetic. My heart was so — I thought it would kill me. Lying in bed in the white room. Eventually the old man showed up. I would’ve — I remember I was lying there and it just felt like it was all wrapped around me and I couldn’t move. Otherwise I would’ve tried to kill him. And Snape was with him.” 

“Jesus.”

Remus’s voice was soft with old venom. “They said, we’ve settled your accounts with the doctor and you have to take the child to Lily’s sister. So I said I didn’t intend to do that and they looked at the vial of drops next to the bed. And the old man said, if you don’t have the child in Seattle in three weeks I’ll hunt you down and kill you and bring him there myself.” 

“Why in hell would he say that?” 

“He thought I would — like what happened to me. When I was young. At least I think that’s why.” 

“He didn’t know you any better than to say — ”

“He didn’t know either of us better than to come to the sorts of fucked conclusions he did. He still doesn’t know. He didn’t know James or Lily either. He thinks we’re his chess pieces to play with and he thinks all our behavior is predicated on a couple of vague truths. Which are that you come from Southern ranching money and I’ve been taking opium since I was eleven.” 

“Do you think he knows about,” Sirius started. Then he stopped. 

“Certainly he does,” Remus said. 

“Christ.” 

“Yes. But I think — I don’t know what he thinks we’ll do. I think he thinks we’ll kill each other.” 

“But we won’t. Won’t we?” 

“We won’t,” said Remus with an uncharacteristic firmness. He sounded pretty sure. 

\--

Sirius woke in the morning and lay in the makeshift bed in the moving shaft of light. There was frost in the corners of the windows and in the very stillness the shadow against the floor seemed embroidered in the corners in a pale blur. He had forgotten what he had been dreaming about. The sky in the window was such a bright china blue and the green of the pine hills against it seemed a contrast sharp as a knife. 

From the bed Remus stirred a little and Sirius turned to watch him. He lay on his back with his mouth a little open and his arm folded over his chest with the hand in a loose fist as though he were clutching something with all the strength sleep would allow. He wore his black flannel shirt to bed and a few buttons had opened in his movements in his sleep showing his neck and chest and the vivid cords of bone and grist at his collar and the hollow of his throat… Sirius looked out the window again. His breath tasted different. Eventually he sat up because he thought his heart would break out of him. His back ached. He thought maybe he should make coffee and maybe he should go outside and bring in firewood and he wondered when it would snow and he wondered when they would fight. Then he looked back toward Remus in the bed. He hovered his hand over the chest of his own shirt and could feel his heartbeat shaking the thin fabric. 

He understood among the lost was the ability to process reality as he once had which was perhaps why everything seemed possessed of this overwhelming deja vu. A second task much the same as the first. A second kind of swallowing and hungry and watchful West. A second iteration of the person in the bed who had been chewed up and spat out and miraculously survived it again and again and again. And a second iteration of himself. And the room at the end of the hall in the long haunted summer. 

It seemed to make quite a bit of sense to get up but when he sat at the edge of the bed he felt half-wild like an unbroken horse. After a moment he could tell Remus was awake (something changed, just in the feeling of the room, the heartbeat current, or the embers in the hearth) though he didn’t open his eyes. The sweet-bright smoke smell was in his hair and the black flannel and all the moth-eaten bedclothes and Sirius thought, hysterically, maybe they had only ever been in the same room together and this was hell… 

He forgot he had a body for a moment kind of wishfully. It shocked him how quickly he moved. He felt possessed; it was the past, he thought, with him, with them, watching; the stillness outside, the river, the tangle of cold jungle and the mountains and the frost, the blue-bright sky, like an eye or a shard of glass. Beyond it the high northland of ice, and the snowed-shut mountain passes, and the elusive gold in the ground and the water, and beyond it the sea, and the sea, having beaten driftwood white against the beach… the haunted-still coastal lands monochrome green-black reflective in the motionless water. Beyond that the struggling manifest farmland and the cities and the prison on the island in the fog and beyond that, beyond, stretching, out of time, like its own sea having beaten all manner of flotsam and jetsam to shards against itself, beyond that was the place where this had come from. 

Inside Remus’s thighs were these shocking black-red ridged marks from dosing morphine. Several of them could not have been a year old and they had been opened over and over again. He was watching Sirius now in an uninterpretable sort of way and when their eyes caught he shifted a little and bent his knees up more as a species of challenge than invitation. Memory unbidden shattered inside Sirius’s mind like a bottle of liquor fallen from a height and spreading: their fucking when he would have called it fucking as opposed to any other poetic variant like some mushroom vision of a clash of wills out of the Greek tragedies — as though both of them wanted to be raptured but neither would surrender. 

Remus reached for him and he pressed the hand back by the wrist against the bedclothes. He thought he wanted more than anything just to see the ways in which this body was different than the one he had known before but there wasn’t time. Perhaps there would be later or in another lifetime. He pressed his mouth against the scabby ridged bend of Remus’s knee in a sort of not-quite-kiss and then he put his free hand against Remus’s belly just to feel the disastrous and familiar shaking elastic tension like a rope drawn taught. It was in his thigh too where the dosing marks felt to the touch like a ribbed garment or the bark of a smooth tree and it was in his wrist shoving at Sirius’s grasp like a trapped bird. 

There is an improbable amount of strength in you, Sirius wanted to say, almost said. Instead he pressed the heel of his hand at the crotch of Remus’s breeches and Remus pressed back toward him, shifting; he let go Remus’s wrist, lost, wanting him to take over, but Remus didn’t move. Sirius pressed his face against his belly at the hem of the black flannel shirt thinking with horror that he might cry and then Remus’s hand was in his hair snarling tangles with his ragged fingernails. 

He thought maybe it was a bad idea after all and maybe he should stop and maybe they should just lie like this. And yet he also thought somewhere in his blood he could almost feel that old thing stirring and he thought from the pace of Remus’s breath and his heartbeat perhaps his was also stirring but he wasn’t sure it would work anymore for either of them after everything. Another lost, he thought. Now he was almost sure he would cry. Remus pressed up against him again wanting to say something very badly but emphatically not saying anything at all and Sirius felt the callused pads of his fingers against his scalp. His belly was trembling and Sirius kissed it. He recalled with this mounting almost fear that previously in their acquaintance nothing had seemed impossible or really even all that difficult and they had managed at times to fuck for hours or otherwise for fifteen minutes depending on time constraints and that they hadn’t had to say a word to each other because they could read each other’s minds but this miraculousness did seem contingent upon the intimacy they had established and the complete disregard for any kind of propriety or shame. And really it was the only occasion they could read each other’s minds. And the only occasion in which trust or vulnerability even between them seemed remotely implicit. 

He was wondering what he would do if he could. Or if he dared. Or if Remus would let him. Everything and nothing. He would devour every wound in apology as though they could be erased — as though the process were transmutable onto his own body or inside his own mind. As though perhaps it would heal him to try and heal someone else. 

In the end it was like diving headfirst into very cold water as he had done six months and a lifetime previous when he had left the prison in the frigid dawn fog. He shucked Remus’s breeches off and drug his mouth along the old-new terrible scars and Remus’s hand tightened in his hair and they didn’t look at each other. His skin was like a map to something horrible buried out in the forest. I fucking love you, Sirius wanted to scream at the top of his fucking lungs like a hawk or something, some terrible wide-winged black bird, vulture hovering, circling, I fucking love you, I fucking love you… He did not dare, he thought, that, yet. Perhaps never. Sucking Remus off was easier, and remembered: slow, not quite gentle, humming a little in his throat some song he didn’t know; he didn’t want to close his eyes, but he didn’t want to look at anything either, and certainly not Remus’s face, nor at the scars, nor at the bed. He wanted to put his fingers inside Remus or otherwise his cock or his whole consciousness but it didn’t seem like there was time. There wasn’t time for anything at all. They had never had time or they had had too much time and they had squandered it, he thought, holy God, and it was nearly gone now, like a land allotment they couldn’t get to grow, it was nearly gone now… 

Remus came, in near silence, a relative surprise in all the existential consideration, and Sirius swallowed and licked him clean; he felt Remus’s thighs trembling, and his belly, and the hand in his hair felt more like petting now, and he wanted more than anything just to lie in the bed together, just to rest, just to listen and wait together until the time was up, until the sun blinked out, but he didn’t think he could bear it. So he got up in a kind of state of shock and splashed his face in the washbasin and went out down the stairs in a kind of sleepwalk haze. When he realized where he was again he was on the bank of the river. 

\--

In the time before he thought he remembered maybe he really hadn’t thought about it at all. It just was. He was furious with Remus constantly and wanted to live with him in a shack on a mountain and wean him off drugs with bone broth and herbal concoctions. The desperate wanting he had not catalogued as such until Remus had endeavored to actualize it. He had considered it theretofore simply a perfectly normal kind of protective care for something rare and not so much fragile as fleeting — like an unsticking flurry of snow or cactus blooms. The way sometimes you would meet people on the trail who had left their lovers in the sleepy wooded East decades previous but they still had a scrap of lace or a tiny portrait or a locket containing an intact curl of hair kept somewhere very clean and safe on their squalid persons. He had wondered in prison if he had ever wanted to be in love or imagined it as a possibility before it happened. It was true what Remus had said at the last that he wanted to be loved so badly it often led him to evil and desperate ends. But that was necessarily different from wanting to be in love. 

He lay in the moving shaft of light on the floor watching the fog in the window and the clouds above shifting showing on occasion a vivid blinding patch of sky. He thought about the desert. He thought he had expected from this life at once more and less than he had gotten out of it. At first he wildly directed blame in the vague direction of every player who had acted upon the grand stage of it. At last it winnowed down to Riddle and Peter and vaguely Dumbledore, for his chessmastery, and vaguely also Remus, for being so fucked up. Finally it unfocused entirely such that he lived inside it, and it changed its name to guilt, and that was a lot of years. Lost years, losing years. To prod at the black hole of it now felt like gouging the semi-numb pit where a lost tooth came from. But that was the function of the fucked nostalgia. This uncanny world that was variant only by the most negligible degrees. That was haunted by the same, possessed by the same, threatened by the same, obsessed by the same, looking altogether the same except almost entirely opposite, greens, browns, frigid humid-cold breath sounds from the forest, the earth moving under one’s feet just so… 

You had to interrogate the desert to get it to show its life. Here it offered life to you like a hand of cards but it seemed a sort of devil’s bargain. 

\--

On the river the fish were jumping in the depths and the current made a sound rolling the small smooth stones. Out of the West rain or snow was gathering in the hills. For a while Sirius turned stones over with his foot looking for gold or something but then he just sat down. After just a couple minutes Remus came out from the shop. His boots were untied and he had thrown his duck coat over his shoulders without putting his arm in it. His face was tight with feeling and flushed still across the cheekbones and Sirius could hardly look at him. He stood kind of imperiously for a while with his arm folded across his chest and then he crouched. His knees cracked. Sirius could hear the fragile wheeze in his breath. He was at war with himself in a familiar way. They had spent so much of the precious fucking time, Sirius thought, trying as hard as they could not to talk about anything at all. 

“Why,” Remus said finally. He wanted to say more but he stopped himself. 

“What do you mean why.” 

“I just mean why.” 

“You looked. I don’t know. My head’s fucked up.”

“Yeah. It is.” He looked up and so Sirius looked up. Above their heads was a bald eagle wheeling silently where the sky was bleeding grey. “If we’re going to do this again it can’t be like last time,” Remus said quietly. 

“Of course. I know that.” 

“Do you really.” 

He supposed he didn’t. But he couldn’t say anything. 

“None of all that would’ve happened,” Remus said. “Like you said last night. None of it would’ve happened at all if we talked to each other.” 

“And then you said, you can’t know that for sure.” 

“No. But maybe it would be worth trying just to see. We have less to lose now, don’t you think. Than we did before.” 

“What did we have to lose before.” 

“I was terrified you didn’t love me. I convinced myself you didn’t because I was so sure. Everything else I, I didn’t even realize I could lose it until I lost it, all of it, you know, and you too, it got dragged away…”

“Like a rip current.” 

“Yes. But we survived that. How could it be worse? I suppose perhaps we’ll find out if we try it again.” 

It started to rain just a bright mist sparkling and striking the tone of a small bell against the water. 

“Why did you run out,” Remus said. Not really a question because it seemed he sort of knew. 

“Obviously I’m bloody terrified.” 

“Of what? Sex? It isn’t — ”

“Idiot. No. Or maybe some. Only partially.” 

“What’s the rest of it then?” 

“Don’t you get the sense — we never have very long. I feel like this can’t be real. Or if it is then it can’t be for much longer. My head’s fucked up. Like I told you. I don’t know, it feels like — every new thing I have to measure in the old sorts of things. So this place feels like the kind of otherworld mirror of our old place. And you like the otherworld mirror of the old you. And this is — we all know how that turned out.” 

“Wouldn’t you rather be happy again with me for six months than — well I guess happy is maybe the wrong word.” 

“It feels like a wound that’s never closed.” 

“Yes. I have it too.” 

“I can’t believe,” Sirius said. He wasn’t going to finish but then Remus, shockingly, smacked his shoulder with the flat of his hand. “I can’t, all your cuts,” Sirius said. 

“I know, they’re rather terrible aren’t they.” 

“Horrible, yes. And you wouldn’t’ve — ”

“You don’t know that either. You don’t — you can’t. Maybe it would’ve gone on and it would have ended even worse. Both of us might’ve died.” 

He remembered in prison at its worst sometimes he would lie in the moving square of light through the window and imagine when he managed to escape and kill those who needed killing he would devote the rest of his life to finding wherever Remus’s grave was. He entertained the rounded dead-end of a bloodied slot canyon or a rare oasis in the desert or a grey swamp deep in the inland north or an ice ledge on a cloud-rimmed mountain or the back alley behind the seediest opium teahouse in a dismal and rotting port city outside of time or mind. It would be somewhere haunted and forgotten and still where only the wind moved and perhaps there would be a stone or a collapsed wooden cross but it was more likely still there would be nothing. Not even a jumble of bones anymore. 

“That thing is like my lover I know hates me but I can’t get rid of,” Remus said. He was looking at the river and there was a small worlds-containing globe of rain in his eyelash. “I have drops in the house actually. Just a little and just in case. But it feels like, you know, like a lock of someone’s hair. And you’re the only thing I ever needed more than that. And it terrified me I think because it would have to mean it was as bad. Or it hurts as bad when you go have to go without it.” 

“Does it.” 

“Yes. Worse. I think. And longer, I mean, it takes longer, to get out of your system entirely. It takes years.” 

“How many years?” 

“You fuck. Years. Decades. It’s still, it feels like, when I wake up. Like this longing out of the darkness. And then this morning you were there and it was better — better than going back to it again after a long time. Just that you were there.” 

“I’m not who I used to be at all.” 

“I know. Neither am I. But — ”

“But yes. Still.” 

Remus looked downriver and upstream and up to the road and then he reached for Sirius’s hand and held it. They waited like that for a little while, or at least it felt like waiting, though he wasn’t sure what for, and Remus’s brow was furrowed tightly, and after a while the pressure of his grip was almost painful, and Sirius knew his own grip probably was too, but neither of them would let go. Finally they got up and went inside. Sirius sat on the bed and then he took his boots off and lay in it, and Remus made coffee, and he moved around with intent as though he were going to tidy up the blankets and parkas on the floor or something, but then Sirius said, “Cut that out.” 

“Cut what out?” 

“Just come here.” 

He did kind of coltishly and he sat where Sirius had not an hour previously looking down at him with the pale clear eyes sharp with some feeling. “You want me to return the favor?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it works.” He felt suddenly extremely embarrassed and he looked past Remus toward the blue slice of sky in the window slowly paling with the haze. “I don’t — you shouldn’t expect — much of anything from me at all, not like this, nor really with anything — ” 

Remus’s mouth pressed over his tasting like chicory and smoke and iron warmer and even sweeter than he remembered and bright and almost vital like tannin-rich water at one of the forest wells, or else like blood, or else like sunlight or else like dust, or else like rain, woodsmoke, far-off thunderstorms at night, the wide flat foot-deep wading river of his birth sparking silver glass like a mirage, like smooth stones, like the wind out of the West: imperfect, vital, stunning, scouring… 

\--

He woke in the morning momentarily unsure where he was. When he opened his eyes he saw he was alone in the bed and on the table beside him was a lukewarm mug of chicory coffee. He put his boots and coat on and took the mug with him out to the street and down to the river where Remus was sitting on an upended crate whittling something held tightly between his knees. It had frozen in the night and there was ice latticed in the mud between the small rounded stones on the riverbank and the cold fog was draped in the trees like a mantle and almost touchable as though the sky itself had dropped down tinsel. And the river rushed and ran with the current patterning upon itself like a quilt reflective refractive in grey-green and blackish moving like — but he couldn’t think what it was like. Like a run of elk or something on the plain far below while the clouds moved overhead across the sun. That night it would snow and stick for the first time, he thought, kind of wishfully , looking West at the clouds in the notch and the fog in the hills and the smoke from the houses. He went to Remus’s side and crouched seeking stones flat enough to skip on the swift glassy water and saw with his old knife whet against any number of evil stones and men’s bones and the very firmament of everything Remus was carving out the rounded knob of a walking stick. 

**Author's Note:**

> [alternate / after / who knows](http://rs-small-gifts.livejournal.com/214588.html)
> 
> this fic for the lovely FinalSoul is part of my [ongoing charitable challenge](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/159055870440/hello-inspired-by-fandomtrumpshate-and-because). you can still sign up if you are interested in taking part! if you enjoyed this story, please consider a donation to [RAINN](https://www.rainn.org/) in FinalSoul's honor.


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